The End Of The Affair

The End of the Affair begins with hatred, which is Graham Greene’s tactful way of informing us that love has already gone very badly wrong. Maurice Bendrix, a novelist of moderate success and considerable emotional untidiness, encounters civil servant Henry Miles on a wet London evening in 1946. Henry is married to Sarah, with whom Bendrix once had an affair, and whom he now despises with the tireless concentration generally available only to people who remain hopelessly in love.

The affair began during the Second World War, while bombs were falling on London and ordinary social arrangements had acquired a temporary and convenient flexibility. Bendrix initially approaches Sarah partly as research for a novel involving a senior civil servant. This is the sort of professional methodology unlikely to be recommended at creative-writing courses, although it produces considerably more plot than keeping a notebook.

Sarah is intelligent, passionate and trapped in a childless marriage to the kind but emotionally unexciting Henry. Bendrix offers intensity, desire and the constant possibility of an argument. Their relationship becomes consuming, secretive and painfully unequal—not because one loves more than the other, but because Bendrix’s love is inseparable from jealousy. Every absence suggests betrayal, every silence conceals another man and every happy moment is immediately inspected for evidence that it may soon end.

Then, during an air raid, Bendrix’s house is struck by a bomb. He appears to have been killed, and Sarah makes a desperate promise to God: if Bendrix is allowed to live, she will give him up. He survives. Sarah consequently ends the affair without explanation, leaving Bendrix to assume the least flattering possibilities and devote the next two years to cultivating resentment as though it were a particularly demanding houseplant.

Unable to endure uncertainty, Bendrix hires the private detective Mr Parkis to follow Sarah. Parkis is earnest, discreet and accompanied on assignments by his young son, producing the curious spectacle of romantic obsession being investigated with the atmosphere of a slightly damp family outing. Through stolen letters and Sarah’s diary, Bendrix finally discovers why she left him—and finds himself confronted not with another lover, but with God, an opponent who is notoriously difficult to challenge to a fistfight.

Sarah’s reluctant movement towards faith forms the heart of the novel. She does not become serenely religious or suddenly pleased about self-denial. She argues, doubts, bargains and resents the God in whom she increasingly fears she believes. Her faith grows not as a comforting answer but as another unwanted love affair, one with even less prospect of a discreet weekend away.

Greene turns the familiar triangle of husband, wife and lover into something more troublesome by adding divine intervention. Henry loves Sarah without understanding her; Bendrix understands parts of her while trying to possess all of her; and Sarah struggles towards a love that requires surrender rather than ownership. Everyone wants happiness, but Greene has placed them in a Catholic novel, where happiness is rarely permitted to arrive without first completing several pages of moral paperwork.

Set amid the bomb damage, rain and tired respectability of wartime and post-war London, The End of the Affair is both an intense love story and a fierce examination of jealousy, belief and hatred. Greene writes with characteristic economy, dry humour and emotional cruelty, exposing the ways in which love can resemble selfishness, faith can resemble betrayal and hatred can be merely love wearing an overcoat and insisting it has moved on.

This 2012 Vintage Classics edition is in Good condition—a sound copy which may show evidence of a previous relationship with a reader, though nothing as destructive as Bendrix’s. An essential novel for admirers of literary fiction, doomed romance and stories in which adultery is only the beginning of the complication, because God has been waiting patiently to enter the triangle.

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